If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood(11)

Danny was good to the girls but pushed back on Shelly more than she’d been used to experiencing. The two of them fought constantly, hard and physically. Dishes shattering. Yelling. Running out the door. All that kind of drama. One time when Lara visited—on a rare occasion when she was allowed to—she noticed holes punched into the drywall. The smart money might’ve been on Danny, though in truth Lara couldn’t be sure which of the adults had slammed a fist into the wall.

Indeed, Shelly’s marriage to Danny was very tempestuous, as had been the case with her marriage to Randy, and ended just the same. When a spat ended and Danny left to cool off or get away, Shelly would pack the girls in the car and start looking for him.

Shelly, her family would later say, always liked to hunt.

Whenever there was a new boyfriend, Shelly had a singular instruction for Nikki.

“You need to call him Dad,” she said.

So Nikki did. When she went to school, her mom would simply enroll her under her new man’s surname. No legal formalities at all, just Shelly’s insistence and good word that she’d created a new family.

Just like that.

Five years into her marriage to Danny, Shelly phoned her father and said she needed money for a divorce. She complained that Danny had betrayed her.

As usual, Les didn’t question any of it.

Anything for Shelly.

It was 1983 and, at twenty-nine, Shelly had a new guy on the string.

“I thought of Danny as my dad,” Nikki recalled, many years later. But once Danny was out of the picture, Shelly set her sights on mild-mannered Dave Knotek. “I remember Mom bringing Dave around at our place in Battle Ground and telling me that he was our new dad. I hated him because I loved Danny. And not too much later, we were packed up for Raymond.”



Even now, Nikki holds on to a memory that comes to her occasionally, visiting her like a ghost.

It was just before the move to Raymond. She was asleep in her bed in the house behind the nursing home in Battle Ground. All of a sudden, she woke up, unable to breathe through a pillow pressed over her face. Nikki started screaming for her mother, and suddenly—as in that very instant—Shelly appeared.

“What is it?” she asked. “Baby, what’s wrong?”

Nikki, crying, said someone had put a pillow over her face.

“It was a bad dream,” Shelly said.

Even then, Nikki knew better.

“It wasn’t a dream, Mommy.”

Shelly fixed her eyes on her little girl and insisted she was wrong. She wouldn’t back down. She didn’t have to. She was, as always, right about everything.

The encounter stayed with Nikki. The speed with which her mother responded. The peculiar look on her face—more interested than concerned.

Later, she would wonder if that was the first time her mother had messed with her mentally, and if she’d done the same thing to others in her life.





CHAPTER EIGHT

Timber. Oysters. And decades later, marijuana.

Soggy and exceedingly gray, Pacific County, Washington, has always relied heavily on nature. It’s been on a boom-or-bust trajectory since the first white settlers came to the rainy, windy spot in the state’s southwest corner in the 1850s. It seems almost dismissive to call the people who live there a hardy lot, but there’s really no denying it. The place where the Pacific Ocean meets the Willapa River and various tributaries is the kind of place in which abundance wasn’t given, it was earned. Its triad of towns—county seat South Bend, Raymond, and Old Willapa—are the county’s backbone. Huge Craftsman homes run along the hills above the bay that empties into the ocean. They speak of a time before the economy ebbed, as it always does in places that depend on natural resources. Only the courthouse, with its Beaux Arts design and magnificent art glass rotunda, still does a booming business. Its annex is where the welfare office is located.

Soggy as it is, the region along the Willapa River to the bay has made its mark in popular culture. Maybe more of a smudge than a mark. Nirvana, originally from Aberdeen, one county away, played its very first gig in Raymond, a town of less than three thousand. Lyricist Robert Wells, who wrote “The Christmas Song” with Mel Tormé and the theme from TV’s Patty Duke Show, grew up there. Author Tom Robbins wrote his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction, in South Bend.

And yet most of those who live there—especially those who have grown up with sawdust and oyster shells—are not famous. Not by a long shot. They fit mostly in that tight space between salt of the earth and hardscrabble.

Dave Knotek was a local Pacific County boy through and through, having lived his first four years in nearby Lebam, before his parents, Al and Shirley, moved along Elk Creek into a little wood-frame house in Raymond. Al was a timber faller, but work in the woods could be spotty. That the Knoteks never had a lot of money was an understatement. Dave and his brother and sister made their own toys—bows and arrows out of sticks and chicken feathers. Country kids like the Knoteks could often be spotted in a Raymond classroom. Their clothing was older, not always in the best shape.

“A few times I started the school year with the same clothes I wore the year before,” he recalled. “No disrespect to my parents. They worked very hard. We just didn’t have the money.”

The daughter of a sawmill worker, Shirley picked up the slack by working in an oyster cannery for quite some time, and then later at J. C. Penney.